Obama eligibility appeal in Roy Moore's court

Newly elected state chief justice has expressed doubt about qualification

Many cases challenging Barack Obama’s presidential eligibility have come and gone, but now an appeal has been filed with a state Supreme Court led by a newly elected chief justice who has expressed doubt about Obama’s qualification for office.

Roy Moore was elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court last November, a decade after he defied a federal order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state Supreme Court building.

Now, 2012 Constitution Party presidential nominee Virgil Goode and Alabama Republican Party leader Hugh McInnish are asking the state’s highest court to force Secretary of State Beth Chapman to verify that all candidates on the state’s 2012 ballot were eligible to serve.

Attorney Larry Klayman, founder of the Washington, D.C.-watch dog Judicial Watch and now head of Freedom Watch, filed the appeal Tuesday with the Alabama Supreme Court, asking for oral arguments.

“We are hopeful that Chief Justice Moore and the rest of the jurists on the Alabama Supreme Court will follow the law,” Klayman told WND.

Klayman says he and his team “have great respect for Chief Justice Moore and his integrity and legal acumen.”

“He is one courageous and brave man. There are few in this country.”

The case is an appeal of a dismissal by the Montgomery Circuit Court.

In his brief, Klayman says “credible evidence and information from an official source” was presented to Chapman before the election indicating Obama might not have been qualified for Oval Office.

The complaint argues Chapman failed her constitutional duty as secretary of state to verify the eligibility of candidates.

Moore is on the record questioning Obama’s eligibility.

In an interview with WND in 2010, he defended Lt. Col Terrence Lakin’s demand that President Obama prove his eligibility as commander in chief as a condition of obeying deployment orders.

Moore said he had seen no convincing evidence that Obama is a natural-born citizen and much evidence that suggests he is not.

Moore said Lakin “not only has a right to follow his personal convictions under the Constitution, he has a duty.”

“And if the authority running the efforts of the war is not a citizen in violation of the Constitution, the order is unlawful,” he said.

‘Affirmative duty’

Klayman asserts the secretary of state “has an affirmative duty that stems from her oath of office under both the U.S. and Alabama Constitutions, to protect the citizens from fraud and other misconduct by candidates.”

As a result of her refusal to investigate the qualifications of candidates for president, Klayman says, “a person believed to be unqualified for that office has been elected.”

The remedy, he said, “is to require each candidate to do what every teenager is required to do to get a learner’s permit.”

“It is to produce a bona fide birth certificate … and the Secretary of State is the official to cause that to happen.”

McInnish is a member of the Madison County Republican Executive Committee and also sits on the state Republican Executive Committee.

Citing the investigation of Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse, Klayman says Chapman “gained knowledge from an official source that there was probable cause to believe the Barack Obama had not met a certifying qualification.”

Thompson, the brief says, “represented that her office would not investigate the legitimacy of any candidate, thus violating her duties under the U.S. and Alabama Constitutions.”

As WND reported, Arpaio and his team concluded that Obama’s long-form birth certificate was a computer-generated forgery.

Klayman, in a previous brief, argued the secretary of state, “having the power to certify candidates, can surely de-certify – in effect disqualify – them if they are found to be ineligible.”

In his new appeal, Klayman points, as an example, to California Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s rejection of Petra Lindsay on the 2012 California primary ballot because she was 27 years old. The U.S. Constitution requires the president to be at least 35.

In his conclusion, Klayman argues the fact that the election is over does not make the case moot.

“It would be paradoxical beyond measure if the real and grave question of the legitimacy of the de facto President, a question which lies at the very heart of our American Constitutional Government, were left unresolved for want of the simplest of documents, a birth certificate.”

If either a bona fide birth certificate is produced or an admission is made that it does not exist, he writes, “this most important of legal questions will have been answered, the purity of Alabama’s ballot maintained, and the anxiety of Alabama citizens stilled.”

If the issue is not resolved, he said, citizens will be left with the impression “that their government was dysfunctional and has ignored their real concerns.

‘Certain documentation’

In an earlier step in the case one year ago, before a panel of Alabama Supreme Court justices, one justice raised doubts about Obama’s eligibility.

The justices denied a petition filed by McInnish seeking to require Obama submit an original birth certificate before he could be placed on the state’s 2012 ballot.

“Mclnnish has attached certain documentation to his mandamus petition, which, if presented to the appropriate forum as part of a proper evidentiary presentation, would raise serious questions about the authenticity of both the ‘short form’ and the ‘long form’ birth certificates of President Barack Hussein Obama that have been made public.”

The “certain documentation” is the findings of Arpaio’s investigation.

“The Alabama Constitution implies that this court is without jurisdiction over McInnish’s original petition,” Parker explained. “The office of the secretary of state of Alabama is not a ‘court of inferior jurisdiction’ that this court may control through the issuance of a writ in response to a petition.”